Abstract: Display advertising, in particular Google’s Visual Search ads and Bing's Hero ads, have recently been used to target consumers searching for specific brands. However, not much is known about their effectiveness. This study addresses the question whether online display advertising can help consumers to more successfully search for their preferred brands, and looks into the attention mechanisms that account for these short term search benefits. Two eye-tracing experiments were conducted. The first experiment investigates the short term search benefits of display advertising, and seeks to establish the persistence of these benefits. The second experiment looks deeper into the features of display advertising, especially the brand logo, and attempts to provide detailed insights into the underlying attention mechanisms. For this purpose, the authors develop a Hidden Markovmodel that is calibrated on eye-movement data collected during online brand search. The findings show that prior exposure to online display ads may improve search efficiency by as much as one third, while the effect persists across three searches on shopping sites. The brand search process, as captured through eye tracking, is shown to mediate the effects of the advertising exposure on search performance.

Abstract: Shopping cart abandonment is considered the bane of Internet retailing and has received increasing attention in the retail industry. Most shopping cart abandonment metrics used in practice are based on purchase outcomes within a given web navigation session and ignore the fact that online consumers can and often do break up a given shopping task into multiple shopping sessions. In this study, we investigate online cart abandonment across multiple shopping sessions and examine its connections to consumers' order and purchase spending decisions. We propose a joint model of cart, order, and spending decisions that takes into account the interdependences of these decisions within and across shopping sessions, and provide a method of accurately predicting the eventual shopping cart abandonment rate. We illustrate the application of our proposed methodology using data provided by an online grocery retailer and examine the effectiveness of shopping cart recovery promotions under different scenarios through simulation analyses.